This week at KubeCon in San Diego, Rancher Labs announced the beta of Rio, the application deployment engine for Kubernetes. Originally announced in May of this year, the latest release is version v0.6.0. Rio combines several cloud-native technologies to simplify the process of taking code from the developer’s workstation to the production environment, while ensuring a robust and secure code deployment experience.
By next year the number of connected devices will exceed 20 billion. The vast majority of these devices run on Arm architecture, increasingly at the infrastructure edge. With this growth in mind, the need for an agile, Arm-based development methodology has become increasingly urgent. Arm Neoverse provides the required IP for building the next gen of edge to cloud infrastructure to support the data explosion we are seeing, primarily caused by IoT.
To get an accurate picture of the current state of Kubernetes deployments, Rancher Labs recently conducted an industry survey that included 1,106 respondents from large and small enterprises across a broad range of more than 25 industries, including technology, financial services, telecom, education, government and healthcare. The respondents were almost evenly split among EMEA and North America and included both Rancher and non-Rancher users.
Prior to version 2.3, new versions of Kubernetes came out with point releases of Rancher and required an upgrade to Rancher before they were made available for use. Rancher 2.3 changes that pattern and now makes it possible to update the metadata store for available Kubernetes versions, disconnecting the Rancher server upgrade process from the Kubernetes cluster upgrade process.
Containers - and Kubernetes - are now a key part of enterprise growth strategy across EMEA. We can see this not only as usage of Rancher grows, but also as the popularity of our local Lighthouse Events increases. In Northern EMEA particularly, the appetite for Kubernetes is accelerating rapidly. How are companies in this region capitalising on Kubernetes?
Today I am very excited to announce that Rancher Labs’ Project Longhorn has been accepted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation as a sandbox project. Many Kubernetes users still find it challenging to run stateful workloads and manage persistent storage. Longhorn aims to help you manage stateful workloads in Kubernetes by providing a solution for persistent storage that you can easily deploy, use, and manage.
The k3s project was started by Darren Shepherd, Chief Architect at Rancher 7 months ago and has already become one of the most popular Kubernetes options on the CNCF Landscape by number of GitHub stars. To put this into context, k3s is more popular than OpenShift by IBM/Red Hat and only Rancher Kubernetes itself is more popular than k3s. Now stars are indicative of interest and popularity only and that should be noted.
Over the last few years, we have seen a significant shift with companies moving away from developing heavy, monolithic applications and instead adopting new approaches like microservices and even serverless applications. These allow companies to work in a faster and more agile way. Speed and agility are important when a task like deploying a new piece of code to production multiple times a day is normal behavior for a modern environment.
Windows Support went GA for Kubernetes in version 1.14 and represented years of work. This has been the effort of excellent engineers from companies including Microsoft, Pivotal, VMWare, RedHat, and the now-defunct Apprenda, among others. I’ve been a lurker and occasional contributor to the sig-windows community going back to my days with Apprenda, and I’ve continued to follow it in my current role with Rancher Labs.
Today we are excited to announce the general availability of Rancher 2.3, the latest version of our flagship product. Rancher, already the industry’s most widely adopted Kubernetes management platform, adds major new features with v2.3.
